A step-by-step guide to set up an email with a custom domain on AWS.

It’s often the case you bought a domain, and you maybe don’t want to use the email hosting service offered by your DNS provider, you just want an email with your custom domain to receive the incoming emails and forward them to your personal email address.

Here’s what I did to set up an email with my custom domain on AWS

# Prerequisite

You need to have your custom domain managed by Route 53. If you purchased your domain from a third-party, you can choose lightsail Update your Lightsail domain name servers to use another DNS service and route 53 Use Amazon Route 53 to point a domain to a Lightsail instance or route 53 solely (by using name servers).

# Create Identity on SES

We then need to use the simple email service to verify our custom domain and email address. Then, you can find you verified domain here:

# Publish MX record on route53

You have to publish an MX record so that your domain can receive the bounce and complaint notifications that email providers send you. For more, check using a custom MAIL FROM domain and publishing an MX record for Amazon SES email receiving and you will see:

# Configure Email Receiving Rule

Go back to SES create a new rule set, remember to set it as active otherwise you won’t receive your verification email later on
click ‘create rule’
Step-1 Step-2 here you can add your email address with your custom domain Step-3 create a SNS topic and selected it

# Create subscriptions to your topic

Go to Amazon SNS, and click on topics, you will find the topic you just created click the topic you created, and click create subscription here you can add your personal email address that will be forwarded to and you will receive AWS-Notification in your personal email address after you created your subscription, if you didn’t receive it, please check the steps above again

# Verify your email address

Go back to SES, and add your identity again, but with email address this time After this, you will receive an email in your personal email address, which is a long json, ctrl+f search “We have received a request to authorize this email address for use with Amazon SES and Amazon Pinpoint in region US East (N. Virginia). If you requested this verification, please go to the following URL to confirm that you are authorized to use this email address:“and click that url, remember to remove \\r\\n\\r\\n. And you will see: which means your email are set up successfully, now go back to SES, choose Get set up on the side bar, you will see two verified status in You can try to send test email to test your email address.

# Reference

Setting Up a Custom Domain and Email Address with AWS SES